Horace Afoot (21 page)

The reading room is busier than usual. Mrs. Entwhistle has been behind the circulation desk all morning without a break. When I came in earlier she told me that Mr. Mohr was at home and she hoped the day would be a quiet one. I fold the newspapers and return them to the counter.

“Anything else?” Mrs. Entwhistle asks without looking up. She is slipping due cards into the pockets of a pile of books. I glance over at my reserved shelf of books and briefly consider spending the rest of the day here.

“Find what you were looking for?” She sweeps the papers from the counter and puts them in a stack of others to be filed away.

“Yes. I suppose I did.”

“What was it?”

“The rapes last summer.”

“Terrible. Just terrible.” She takes off her reading glasses and lets them drop on their little gold chain onto her bust. Her broad features pucker into a look of consternation. “I hear the whole family has moved.”

“Family?”

She wheels her chair closer. “The house is empty. For sale. They just picked up and left town practically overnight without saying a thing to anyone. I heard they moved to California or some place out west. Couldn’t stand to be reminded, I guess.”

I realize she’s talking about what Ross called the Liberty Street rape. The mother and daughter.

“Between you and me,” Mrs. Entwhistle continues, “I think it’s probably for the best.”

“Who can say what’s best?”

“Well, that’s right too,” she says with a wary note in her voice, suspecting I might be harboring an opinion. “It’s so tragic.” A tear wells up in the corner of her eye, and she wipes it away. “I don’t know what I’d do,” she begins but then stops short.

You mean if it were you? I’m tempted to say, but finishing her thought for her would be as impertinent as is her empathy. The tendency fascinates me, the persistent reframing of the world into hypothetical personal experience. The only purpose I can see in the whole exercise is the manufacture of a flattering self-image. “If it were
me
, I’d …” Mrs. Entwhistle fidgets delicately with her reading glasses and the gold chain around her neck, aware of the nasty spot where empathy has landed her. I can hear the wheels grinding—“If it were me.” Finally she looks up and changes the subject completely. “Mr. Mohr has told you of his plans, I assume.”

“He has, yes.”

An elderly man approaches the desk holding a thick volume in both hands. “Things aren’t going to be the same here without him.” She slips on her reading glasses and pedals herself away to check out the old man’s book. I consider the possibility of a double meaning, a “When I’m in charge things’ll be different,” but decide to take her statement at face value.

“Will he be in later?”

“Tomorrow morning,” she says, her librarian cheer returned, all subjects having been returned—on time—to their proper shelf.

The sky is threatening more snow. I cut across Main Street at the blinking traffic light and find myself walking in the direction of Liberty Street. It is hard to make sense of all the news that has been shoveled under my nose in the last day or so, the lifting of the veil of blissful ignorance. Sylvia is at the core of a morbid curiosity I know better than to indulge but which I am indulging nevertheless. Until now I had not wanted to know anything of the town’s doings. Now it seems a whole hidden world has come to light, and I am allowing myself to be pulled into it.

At the top of Liberty I pause as a car backs out of a driveway, blocking the sidewalk. The driver looks at me and waves. I wave back. A man I don’t remember seeing before, he rolls down the window. “Anything I can help you with?” His voice is friendly but inquisitorial.

“Just out for a walk.”

An elbow juts out the window. The man nods. “I’ve noticed you sitting in the gazebo,” he says.

I nod.

“It’s a nice spot.” He twists his body around, poking a hand out the window. “Tom Schroeder,” he says.

We shake. “Schroeder’s Shoes?”

“That’s me. You been to the store?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Well, come on out.” He peers down at the boots on my feet. “We’ll fix you up.”

“You have a son named Tom, don’t you?”

“I do indeed. You know him?”

“In a way, yes.”

“He’s off at college. Got a scholarship to Notre Dame. I didn’t catch your name.”

“Horace.”

It is hard to make any connection between the two Schroeders. The father seems thoroughly innocuous despite the interrogation that he is trying to make as pleasant as possible. I consider unleashing a stream of complaints about his son, but it would be pointless. We seem to have arrived at the end of the conversation. Schroeder checks his rearview mirror. “Well, have a good one.” He backs out into the street, waves to me again as he drives off.

I continue down the street. The house with the For Sale sign is the last one on the block, which dead-ends in woods. It is a little farther down from Wilkington Park and the gazebo. If the sign was there the last time, I didn’t notice it. The house is a hulking gray old Victorian with a turret on one corner and a large front porch that looks as if it settled into place fifty years after the house did. A wide yard at the front and a tall row of hedges separates the property from the neighbor on one side, and a driveway overhung with elm trees seems to blend the whole place into the woods on the other side and makes it feel gloomy.

I walk as far as the end of the street, then turn back. Had Schroeder not stopped me I might have been tempted to walk around and inspect, but I now feel that I’m being watched and am a little intimidated. It’s not just gloom that surrounds the place but an air of affliction. I can’t imagine that anyone ever wanted to live in it. I pass by the house again,
142 of Mrs. Entwhistle. The gossip of the town seems just as likely to have caused the evacuation of the house as the rape itself.

The Hound of Liberty Street rounds the corner and bounds up to me, barking and wagging its tail. It crouches up against my legs, tail and rear end waggling furiously while I pat its head. We stand at the curb looking across the wide yard at the house, the dog and I. Snow begins to fall.

I haven’t set foot outside for days except to bring in wood from the porch. It is quiet. The only sounds are water dripping from the roof, the crackle of the stove, the occasional hiss of car tires on the street. The snow and muck and damp air aren’t really what has kept me indoors these several days. I am afraid to go out—afraid of stumbling onto more contingencies. And the longer I remain inside the greater my fear seems to grow. I’m not sure I understand completely, but I think it’s fairly common—the disinclination to participate in the riot of unintended incidentals and possibilities and truth values derived apart from propositions and conditionalities and the general roaring in the ears of all the finite facts of the world.

Standing on the front porch, I listen to the water trickling from the roof, a load of musty wood bundled under one arm. Damp air and a falling barometer have affected the functioning of the stove, and the raw, sodden smell of creosote and smoke permeates the air inside the house. After stoking the fire I go back outside and slog through wet snow to the side of the house to check on the chimney. Rather than rising in columns or plumes, the smoke merely oozes asthmatically into the atmosphere and hangs in the air above the house. I can’t tell what is causing the problem—if the chimney is blocked or if it has something to do with changing barometric pressure. As long as smoke is coming out, I figure there is nothing to worry about.

A quiet knock sounds at the door. It is the kid from next door. He is standing on the porch holding a snow shovel that is almost as tall as he is. “Want your walk shoveled?” he asks timidly.

I motion him inside. He leans the shovel against the side of the house and enters cautiously. He stands just inside the door and glances tentatively at my living room quarters as though captive on foreign soil. I judge him to be about ten or eleven. He has the idle air of a young boy with a secret or two tucked under his belt. He didn’t expect to be invited inside and is already formulating his description of the weirdo neighbor’s house, which he will relate to Mom and Dad at dinnertime.

“How much do you charge?”

“Ten dollars.”

“It looks pretty deep. Can you do it alone?”

“I did our walkway in less than an hour. My dad did the driveway. He has a plow.”

I pull the curtain aside and look over. The riot of plowing that has been going on every morning for the past three days has created a high mound of snow that rises up at the end of the neighbor’s driveway. Dad’s truck with the snowplow attachment is parked before it in an attitude of casual victory. Mom’s car is parked just behind, beneficiary of the big-boy violence of snow moving. The boy snuffles, swipes his nose with a torn glove, and stands on the mat with blank preadolescent insolence.

“How many walkways have you shoveled today?”

“None.”

“I thought you said you did yours in under an hour?”

“Yeah. But that don’t count.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t get paid. It’s part of my chores.” He twists to look out the window, embarrassed by his admission of domestic servitude.

“Did your parents suggest you come over here?”

“No. I mean, well, sort of. Dad told me if I wanted to get paid I had to go out and find work. He don’t pay for chores ’cause he says Mom don’t get paid for housework and he says he don’t pay himself for chores, so why should he pay me?”

“What do you want the money for?”

“A TV.” He makes reproachful eye contact. “I’m saving up.”

“What do you want a TV for? Don’t your parents have one?”

“Yeah, but I want my own so I can watch what I want to watch.”

“How much have you saved?”

“Thirty.”

“How much do TVs cost?”

“The one I want is two hundred.”

“That’s twenty shoveling jobs.”

“Seventeen,” he says and swipes at his nose again.

“If I hire you, will you stop spying on me?”

The boy looks down at his feet. A shit-eating smirk and more shifty embarrassment.

“That new set of binoculars you got last summer. They work pretty well, don’t they?”

“I wasn’t spying.”

“I bet you’re glad I broke that first set.”

“I wasn’t spying. I swear.”

“I’ve seen you sneaking around back there in the woods with them.”

“I was looking for deer.”

“You were looking for them in the direction of my house.”

“I was looking all around. I swear.”

“If I hire you, will you promise to stop?”

“I wasn’t spying,” he insists, eyes filled with mock hurt and resentment.

“Promise me you’ll cut it out.”

“I wasn’t spying.”

“What are you going to do for money when the snow is gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have a proposition. Since you’re so good at spying, bring me information and I’ll pay you for it.”

“Whad’ya mean?”

“Tell me what’s going on, what you see and hear.”

“Stuff from the news?”

“Whatever you think is important. I’ll pay you.”

He considers the offer. “What about the snow?”

“I’ll pay you to shovel my walk. Afterward, though, I want information.”

“Okay,” he says, shifting nervously. I open the door and he slips outside without looking at me.

In twenty minutes he has cleared a path halfway from my porch to the curb. I watch him through the window. In a few days he’ll have his television set, and his interest in binoculars will evaporate, and they will collect dust in a closet with all the other gadgets he’s grown bored with until the day he packs to leave home.

Getting through the shrink-wrapped cornucopia of industrial farming that is Riteway is not pleasant or easy. Time inside is slowed by some mysterious effect of light and sound so that people’s movements seem drowsy. It takes an effort of will not to succumb. I dart up and down the aisles dropping what I need into the basket and ticking it off my mental list. In the fresh produce section I browse among hybrids flown in from distant points around the globe. I’m always curious but rarely tempted by lettuce that actually comes in the size and shape of a baby’s bib, square tomatoes piled neatly into pyramids, apples powered by their own internal sources of electricity, oranges that can talk, carrots that will serve as entrenching tools, and bananas that will lift payloads many times their weight into low satellite orbit.